Follow the author of this article

Follow the topics within this article

To celebrate 100 years since British women were given the right to vote, The Telegraph - alongside the Mayor of London's #BehindEveryGreatCityCampaign - is running a weekly series.

'Hidden Credits' will look back and celebrate individual women who have smashed glass ceilings, helped change society for the better and given the UK's capital something to boast about.

One million revellers joined celebrations for the Notting Hill Carnival this bank holiday weekend, but without Rhaune Laslett-O’Brien, one of the original organisers, Europe’s biggest street party may have never materialised.

Born in London’s East End to a Native American mother and a Russian father in 1919, Laslett-O’Brien went on to become a significant figure in the Notting Hill community and actively sought to remedy the racial tensions that plagued the area during the 1950s, which culminated in the 1958 Notting Hill riots and the murder of Kelso Cochrane the following year.

An activist, Laslett-O’Brien ran a 24-hour legal advice service for immigrants, local residents and the homeless from the ground floor of her own home at Tavistock Crescent, and set up an adventure playground, Shanty Town, for children in the local area.

World heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali signs autographs during a visit to the London Free School at 34 Tavistock Crescent, the home of Rhaune LaslettCredit:
R. McPhedran/Hulton Archive

Alongside political activist John “Hoppy” Hopkins she also co-founded the London Free School, an adult education project inspired by American free universities which promised to offer ‘free education through lectures and discussion groups in subjects essential to our daily life and work’, in addition to being 'not political, not racial, not intellectual, not religion, not a club…[and] open to all.'

It was in between these duties that the social worker, then 45, first had the idea of a festival to bring these values to light and during a summer's night more than 50 years ago it came to her in the form of a vision or ‘hamblecha’, as it is known among Native Americans.

Later recalling the dream in an interview with the Caribbean Times, she said “I could see the streets thronged with people in brightly coloured costumes, they were dancing and following bands and they were happy. Some faces I recognised, but most were crowds, men, women, children, black, white, brown, but all laughing.”

Though the actual date of the first Notting Hill Carnival has been long disputed, it is believed that Laslett-O’Brien’s kaleidoscopic event began on the sunny August Bank Holiday weekend of 1965, shortly after having her vision.

However, it was the following year that saw Laslett-O’Brien’s vision fully realised when, in collaboration with the London Free School, Notting Hill’s first multicultural street festival featuring local residents from India, Ghana, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine and Cyprus took place.

Performers included Nigerian musician Ginger Johnson and his Afro-Cuban band, Agnes O’Connell and her Irish Girl Pipers and a white New Orleans-style marching band. Crucially, it was Laslett-O’Brien’s invitation to Russell Henderson’s group, which led a steelpan procession up Portobello Road, garnering revellers along the way, that inadvertently put a Caribbean twist on the festival forever.

For Laslett-O’Brien, who died in 2002 and retired from organising the festival in 1970, her brainchild has gone far beyond her original vision of bringing communities together and ridding the area of pre-conceived notions that saw it as a run-down slum.

And as for narratives that seek to dispute her presence in the Notting Hill Carnival’s history, Henderson recalls: “I’d hate to think people have left her out of the history because of her colour. I never went on the streets playing for anyone before I did it for her... Carnival started with Mrs Laslett.”